By Fatema C, Siddhi J 

It started with a small comment. “I like how I am getting to drink water alongside everyone,” one participant said. At first it sounded like nothing. Then he explained why he’d noticed it. In his village, he isn’t allowed to sit with the rest of the community. Sharing water was one of the few times that rule didn’t apply.

It was September 8, and thirty strangers had gathered at the Sambhaavnaa Institute in the Himachal hills for the Buland Iraade workshop. The topic was gender and patriarchy. But that one comment about water set the real tone for the five days ahead: Who gets to sit together? Whose choices are allowed, and whose aren’t? How do caste, gender, and sexuality work together to keep people in their place?

The workshop didn’t rely on lectures. In one exercise, people walked across the room as the most powerful person they could imagine, then walked back as the least powerful. Power stopped being just an idea. People could feel it in their shoulders, their pace, and whether they looked others in the eye. 

In another exercise, everyone was asked to remember the first time they realised their own gender. For many women, the memory came quickly: a first period, a piece of clothing they weren’t allowed to wear, and a curfew their brothers never had. Most of the men, though, couldn’t remember such a moment at all. For them, gender had simply never announced itself.

By the time the group turned to sexuality, they had already spent days questioning how much of identity is really “personal” at all. So when someone asked what sexual orientation actually means, or what BDSM is once you remove the sensational version, or whether attraction is really the whole story, these weren’t just ideas anymore. How do consent, boundaries, and power operate within sexual relationships? People answered with their own confusion and their own labels, some speaking about it out loud for the first time, in front of people they’d known for only a few days.

That moment matters. But a workshop isn’t a full reckoning, and by the last day, a gap had appeared. The conversation on sexuality mostly used familiar words, the kind of language common among English speakers in cities who’ve already read about these topics. What got less attention was how caste and class change what sexuality costs a person. Coming out means something very different for a Dalit queer person than for someone from an upper caste. Patriarchy was named often, and rightly, as the force behind all this. But in India, patriarchy never travels alone. It comes with caste and class, and it looks different depending on where you stand.

The five-day journey of Buland Iraade flowed like a rhythm. It began with an exploration of power and privilege, moved into questions of gender and sex, travelled through the history of patriarchy, and opened up conversations around caste and sexuality. But this was not simply a sequence designed by the facilitators and followed by the participants. As the days unfolded, the journey began to take its own course, shaped and reshaped by the questions, reflections, and lived experiences that participants brought into the room.

Some conversations began with an apparently simple question and slowly opened doors to memories that had remained unspoken for years. As participants connected the larger structures being discussed to their own lives, the room witnessed moments of deep vulnerability. Several participants spoke about experiences of sexual abuse, some for the first time in a collective space. Many broke down while recounting what they had lived through.

Their tears were not moments separate from the larger conversations on patriarchy, gender, or power. They became a way of understanding them.

None of this erases what people took home: new words for things they didn’t have words for before. That matters. Language is often the first tool anyone gets to understand themselves. But if Buland Iraade wants to go further next time, it could start with a harder question: whose sexuality is easy to talk about in this room, and whose still needs someone to open the door?

The workshop ended on the fifth day. But for the participants and facilitators who sat in that room, Buland Iraade was only just beginning.